L.R. Harvey Poetry

TO A YOUNG ATHEIST Did you look beneath the bed?  What about the dark space between  Orion’s ribs? Inside yourself, or down where the willows weep? Forgive this mirky metaphor, but all I’m saying is you’d better look for Him yourself before you ask for help, and everywhere, before you come to the con-                clusion that He never can be found.

FURTHER STILL                                    — commemorating the 2020 Space X launch If on arriving there, the t here is h ere and there is only there   again, one must consider that we never really reached the place at all. How quickly outer space is inner space, and if experience has taught me anything it’s that we tend to gaze away from what we know. Keep going, Musk, and testify to the existence of  a satisfaction on another planet we can reach surely from Mars.

EUCATASTROPHE Passers congregate to watch the artist work, thick as famished moths encountering a porch- light in the heart of Central Park. “What is it?” they ask religiously, and tilt their heads to gain perspective on the ugly, irreligious  marks he scrawls across the canvas cloth.  “But what's it mean ?’ they beg to know, and some resort to theories showing how it all makes perfect sense if you will squint accordingly or view it as a piece of modern  art, void of intent—but then another line,  another spot, and explanations must begin afresh. Watchers fidget as the evening  tightens in. “Meaningless!” some determine, trickling home despondent at the state  of things. It’s but a hopeful few who stay until the bitter end, when with a flourish  he inverts the canvas, laughs. They gasp!

IDENTIFYING THE DIDASKALOS* He is the hungry man who sits on heaven's portico, not quite dead enough to sunder wide  the heavy doors and enter wide- eyed into life, not yet hopeless to the point of trickling off to dead- end shelters where they dole  out broth and promise it will all be over soon. He’ll stay until they summon him across. Till then he leans against the doors to catch a scattered syllable or  two, then scuttles off to share the bits he heard, or hopes he heard— something about a well, a feast.                Go see!, he says. I magine what I missed!                                    * Teacher

PRONE TO WANDER Legs stuck to Chevy leather in our melting cargo shorts,  and mom had made us wear our luminescent tee-shirts in case her State Fair night- mares actualized. Remember ,  she would say, and we’d recite the Straying Child’s Creed like 4 confessing monks, minds heavy not with sin but with a deep- fried turkey leg. Don’t move, and you’ll return to us, we’d  faithfully repeat, but really not till now did I come to appreciate the doctrine. Lord, I’m staying put exactly where I left You last—      the little yellow house on                                Shawnee Trail. I'll be out front.

EDEN RECALLED I know this place—know well  its slopes and dips and dimples where the dust collects, and yes, I plan to stick around a while yet.  If home is where you spend  your time then this is mine,  though I had thought a place was only home if you could navigate it half awake. Where am I then,   and what exactly am I feeling for with bruises on my shins? It's surely that which hides itself in distant recollection, frail as infant memories, like pulling in at night  to hear my father whisper, Wake up, son, we're home , the car key's click.

THE HONEST SKEPTIC It must be how he eats the place,  sloshing it around his tongue to give ten-thousand buds a taste of it, the way his Pop would gum           a liquid egg and toast. He lives with           remnants in his teeth. Would it be           best to scrub them raw or even get           veneers? Those people creep him out with their unblinking grins, their white unquestionables,  but there’s no fear of smiling  when everything is known. Still,           one has to wonder if it's certainty           compels them tighten up their bags,           graft away grey, and then, eventually,            kill themselves with plastic hearts.   If that's the case, he'll take a bit of almond in his teeth, even if he'll never fully wedge it out with brushing or a water pick.

ORACLE Hope is not a thing with wings— is not a pumpkin muffing swelling in the tin, is absolutely not a sun- rise on the San Francisco Bay. Deduction is the easy part. I do not claim to be the voice of unarticulated things, but seeing as I've yet to capture it with butter or a filtered photograph,  I know what hope is not. And if  if isn’t muffins or the sun, I'm left  to then conclude that it is something  padding softly round the spirit's bend,  largely still unspoken, or maybe, inversely, the tongue of all that speaks.

SNOOZING STRAIGHT TO THE ABYSS The bloody hand of consciousness  has shattered, again, this glass of mock reality. It grips me by  the throat to whisper 'Wake up sleepyhead,' and I'm awake but still a sleepyhead, and my these sheets are seaweed soft   to suck me back where it’s safe.  What good is surfacing to sink a slow return? You know, O Lord,  my morning tendencies. I’m cold      and bleary-eyed, so help me kick.

IDEOLOGICAL SPRING CLEANING He spins, from mere necessity  of footing in the airy  emptiness of modern man,  a thread or two on which to plant  himself, but finds that he  has not the Great Farini’s  gift of balance. No, this will  require more than one. Still,  a thinker knows that one's   enough to generate the kind  of exponential growth so common with bacteria, and given time a little home will nestle in a corner of the space—and given time  a fly will hopelessly entangle in the little home, and given  time the spider will grow fat  with thick complacency that  given time requires squashing with a broom to clean the filth.

Woodpecker   To know is better than to not, but then again that bluebird isn’t ruffled by my old confusion as to why   I can’t conclude. Of course you aren’t, bluebird! You’re closer to the source than I! But then again so is the guy ramming   his head against a tree like it’s enjoyable, so maybe it’s personality. Here’s hoping all of us get a worm this morning.

EAST OF EDEN, TENNESSEE Yes Lord, I must admit  I oftentimes resent the AM radio you gave me for a mind—forgive  me this ingratitude.  And yes, I know I should  be thankful for a frequency at all, but when the only station currently available  is schizophrenic garble from seven talk-show hosts impersonating dried rice in a blender, gratitude  is difficult. The road  goes on for miles more, so please just come in clear, or maybe alter my criteria for clarity since static is to be expected this far east.

A BREAKFAST HOPE A dream makes sense within a dream,            till waking sends it down the stream                       of undefined perplexities too deep  to plumb with modern instruments.            And seeing as a copious amount                      of This is well beyond my means to comprehend, would it be too            presumptuous to then deduce                      that maybe, Lord, I’m waking up?

LOST IN TRANSLATION              "It may be simply that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear." - Winnie the Pooh No second-hand embarrassment  can top the dinner when my dad  said 'what?' not once but twice to Dr. Chintalapudi. Inevitably I was stupefied—what desperation could drive a man to this extent when simply nodding with a smile  and a ‘yeah" is always on the table, and yes, that's if the conversation doesn't call your bluff, but that occasion's rare, even for amateurs. Since then  I’ve morphed into my dad or someone like him (though this won't qualify as news to You,) and with the tide of retrospect compassion came an                understanding of my wife’s confusion as to what possesses a man to spend  an afternoon out on the stoop, alone, conversing with the air and asking what my father did, but more than twice.

SUN SPOTS Ah, such fickle things of mock solidity, refusing       to evacuate my corneas but discontent to settle down and sit a spell— intent instead to saturate my vision with impermanent       consistencies that best are classified as shifting evidence of what is fixed.